A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 550 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenry David Thoreau. (n.d.). A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers
- MLAHenry David Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers.
- ChicagoHenry David Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Thoreau's first book, of 1849: the account of a two-week boat journey he and his brother John made in 1839, compressed into seven days.
Context and history
He wrote it in the hut at Walden, and the real occasion is not the journey: John had died of tetanus in 1842, suddenly and horribly, and the book is Thoreau's way of going back there. He says this nowhere; the brother appears only as 'my companion', and the grief is everywhere and in no sentence. Each day on the water serves as a thread for digressions on friendship, poetry, the sacred books of India, Christianity and the history of the valley's Indians. It was a complete commercial failure: of the thousand copies he had to buy back more than seven hundred, and he wrote in his journal that he had a library of nine hundred volumes, seven hundred of which he had written himself. 'Walden' came afterwards.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere, Sudbury, that is Southborough men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of; their labored homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;—such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stand all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples full of glee and sap, holding in their buds until the waters subside. You shall perhaps run aground on Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year’s pipe-grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the Northwest Coast. I never voyaged so far in all my life.…